“You didn’t orter wear it. Such jimcracks ain’t for funerals. Rennet hain’t got on none,” grandma said, while Anna frowned insolently, and Reinette looked on and shivered, and held her hands tighter together, and thought how dreadful it all was, and how it could be that these people belonged to her, who at heart was the veriest aristocrat ever born.
Phil did not come near her, but kept close to Mr. Beresford’s carriage, and to Pierre, to whom he spoke in French, thereby so delighting the old man that he began to jabber so rapidly and gesticulate so vehemently that Phil lost the thread entirely, and shook his head in token that he did not understand. Without exactly knowing why, Phil felt uncomfortable and ashamed, and the Ferguson blood had never seemed so distasteful to him as now. Reinette had seen them first, and so ignored him, and he did not like it at all. Had there been no step-grandmother, nor aunt, nor Cousin Anna, he could have come up by himself, he thought, in his father’s handsome carriage, with the high-stepping bays, and the coachman, who, without the aid of livery, looked so respectable and dignified upon the box, and it would all have been so different. But now he felt slighted and overlooked, and shabby, and there was a soiled spot on the knee of his pants, and his hands were cut with briers and dirty, too, and there was nothing airy or exquisite about him as he entered Mr. Beresford’s barouche with that gentleman and Pierre, and followed the other carriage where Reinette sat, silent and motionless, with her blue veil tied closely over her face as if to hide it from the eyes opposite scanning her so curiously.
Never once did she look from the carriage window, or evince the slightest interest in any thing around her, and when, as they reached the village and turned into the main street, Mrs. Ferguson motioned with her hand to the right, and said:
“There, Rennet—way down there under them popple trees is the house where I live, and where your mother was born,” she never turned her head, or gave a sign that she heard; only the hands locked so tightly together, worked a little more nervously, and there was an involuntary shrug of her shoulders, which Anna resented hotly.
At last, as the silence became unbearable to grandma, she said to Reinette:
“I s’pose you don’t remember your mother.”
Reinette shook her head, and grandma continued:
“How old was you when she died?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t know how old you was when your mother died? That’s curis. Didn’t your father never tell you?”